text: Braterman is the author of over 120 technical publications and two academic books. He worked as a physical inorganic chemist, but with interests crossing traditional subject boundaries.
  An interest in metal carbonyl spectroscopy led on to work on bonding and reactivity in organometallic chemistry. A long-standing interest in charge transfer phenomena, and their possible relevance to photochemical water splitting, led to studies of combined spectroscopy and electrochemistry in Bipyridine derivatives and their transition metal complexes.
  Under the influence of Graham Cairns-Smith, he became interested in photochemical and other possible reactions on the early Earth, in connection with the origins of life, and later in isotopic fractionation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isotope_geochemistry  as evidence of reactions taking place there.  In view of the possible importance of minerals in the origins of life, he investigated as model systems, the formation and stability of layered double hydroxides, their interaction with chemically bound organic molecules, and effects on particle morphology.